Authors: Ernest Kurtz
After the General Service Conference of 1959, however, Bill Wilson again found himself torn by pressures that, while in conflict as to means, were directed to the same end — the maturity of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Nobody wishes to quit the “papa” business any more eagerly than I do. A.A. needs to stand on its own feet, that’s the primary thing.… What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to transfer the remainder of my leadership to a Board in which I cannot have full confidence? I haven’t the slightest ambition to be the Great White Father of A.A., I am fully fed up with it.… [But at St. Louis] I … agreed to turn over full responsibility to the groups.… So, when they still refuse to name a majority of their own membership to run their own affairs, I wonder if they are really doing this. It looks to me rather that they were consulting their fears rather than their trust.…”
11
And so Wilson, clearly by 1961, entered the lists again, now even more strongly and explicitly stressing the responsibilities of “Responsibility” itself. A late 1961 letter to Bill from Dr. Tiebout, a letter in which the Connecticut psychiatrist promised to vote against Wilson’s proposed trustee ratio change, offered — in the reason Tiebout gave for his stand — the clear reason why Wilson felt it necessary to push his project: “Most [A.A.s] are not impressed by the need to grow up.” If this reason itself proved not sufficiently stinging to his former client, the doctor concluded by reminding Bill of something he had been telling him for almost twenty years: “Incidentally, may I again stress what I noted in passing [!]: I am not very much moved by the emphasis on growing up. Most adolescents are very conscious of having grown up. The trouble is that they do not know that they still have a lot to learn.”
12
The battle continued, intermittently but at times bitterly, over the next four years. As it progressed, Wilson increasingly urged A.A.’s trustees to ponder the meanings of “responsibility,” especially that of Alcoholics Anonymous to those outside its fellowship who had apparent need of its program. By late 1964, Dr. Tiebout came sufficiently around to Bill’s way of thinking to vote for the ratio change. In his letter of thanks to the psychiatrist, Wilson stressed that he himself “continued to be ever more interested in the psychological implications of the change. [For] in considerable part, progress seems to be measured by the movement from irresponsibility toward responsibility.” A similarly motivated letter to another trustee-supporter drove home the same point. After reviewing his concept of “leadership,” Wilson summarized: “The word ‘responsibility’ is the keynote of every democracy, and of Alcoholics Anonymous also. Nearly every A.A. principle asks us to become more responsible, as individuals, as areas, and as a whole.”
13
Yet the question and concern continued to gnaw. A final exchange of letters between Tiebout and Wilson rehearsed the points at issue. Despite his own recent vote, Bill’s former therapist rebuked:
You state that the continuation of the non-alcoholic majority at the top “would be a standing confession of our weakness and irresponsibility.” I simply disagree with that observation.…
I was not impressed by this coming-of-age bit. Every adolescent glories in his sense of being grown-up but he still has a lot to learn before he is really mature.… The mature person has no reason to assert his independence; he is comfortable in the realization that he does not have to go it alone in life.
Your continued stress on A.A.’s need to assert independence strikes me as lamentable. I wish you would stop reminding A.A.’s that they need to grow up. That can start some very screwy thinking.
14
The ex-patient replied in concepts likely learned in his own therapy:
Almost any experienced A.A. would heartily agree that we are immature adolescents, and he would include himself. To outgrow some of these traits and thereby enable us to better deal with adult responsibility has always been a chief aim — sobriety being only the starting point.
Since “coming of age” seems a pretty important turning point in the life of an individual, we have assumed this would be the case for A.A. as a whole — hence “St. Louis, 1955.” To most of us this meant the assumption of full responsibility for the management of our own affairs. At the time we were careful to note that we
had not
“grown up” — we simply proposed to go on our own, minus the former guardianship of the old-timers.
… It is notable that each of these [elided] projects encountered heavy resistance from our “protectors” — a Board of Trustees composed of “old-timers” and nonalcoholics. The nub of their view always was that our instability and immaturity would preclude success.
For ten years now we have seen much the same phenomenon respecting the implications of the ratio business.…The underlying, though not spoken, argument was the same: it was “immaturity” and, surprisingly, I find this inference in your letter.
When I look at such events and ask to what extent these developments — over Trustee protests — were powered by childish rebellion on the one hand, and by legitimate aspiration on the other, I can’t estimate. I can only report that the net result of these forces has been in the direction of increased A.A. responsibility, despite the fears of our protectors on the Board.
15
In the early summer of 1965, exultantly flexing its sense of internationalism by meeting in Toronto, Ontario, the Thirtieth Anniversary Convention of Alcoholics Anonymous accepted as its keynote “The Declaration.” That declaration embodied Wilson’s decade-long vision of A.A.’s ultimate responsibility. In accepting it, each member of Alcoholics Anonymous pledged: … “I Am Responsible. When anyone, anywhere, reaches out for help, I want the hand of A.A. always to be there. And for that: I am responsible.” Bill Wilson himself, his insatiable thirst now directed to alcoholics rather than alcohol, had set up this theme, having used his keynote address at that year’s General Service Conference to warn against a too complacent focus on international diffusion and increasing numbers. His pointed challenge began, “What happened to the six hundred thousand who approached [A.A.] and left?” and the co-founder went on to estimate that the program and fellowship had “reached less than ten per cent” of those needing its help.
16
Under the impact of this continuing stress on “Responsibility,” the long sought change in A.A.’s trustee ratio finally occurred in 1966. The terse but emotion-laden words of the published “Landmarks in A.A. History” read, “1966: Change in ratio of Trustees of the General Service Board to provide for a two-thirds majority of alcoholic members, the historic occasion on which the A.A. Fellowship accepts top responsibility for the future conduct of all its affairs.”
17
Wilson’s concern through these efforts and events did not arise only from the long-standing psychiatric critique of the emotional immaturity of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the three years previous, this criticism had three times burst the bonds of the sedate professional journals in which to that point it had been buried. Articles in
Harpers, The Nation
, and — the unkindest cut — even the
Saturday Evening Post
, had strongly and sharply flayed Alcoholics Anonymous over both supposed developments within its fellowship and the philosophy underlying its program. Such criticism came to the attention not of professionals but of the public-at-large who perhaps needed the program’s therapy but could now rationalize the refusal to seek it.
18
Thus, the concept of “Responsibility” became relevant. Anything about A.A. that discouraged investigation of or openness to its program by those in need of its therapy was clearly a manifestation of irresponsibility and so a testimony to “immaturity.” Alcoholics Anonymous itself, of course, faithful to its Tenth Tradition concerning “public controversy” even over itself, did not offer public defense or openly enter the fray. Indeed, Wilson advised those protesting the cavalier treatment of their beloved fellowship to heed not only its Tenth Tradition but the possible grains of truth in the criticism itself:
Probably the Cain article kept some people away from A.A. Maybe some will stay sick longer, and maybe a few will die because of it.
But so far as we folks who are in the fold are concerned, I think it a rather good experience. In all the years this is the first thorough-going criticism our Fellowship ever had. So the practice of absorbing stuff like that in good humor should be of value.
Despite its petulant and biased nature, the piece did contain some half-truths. It certainly applied to some A.A.’s at some places at some times! Therefore it should help us take heed of these natural tendencies.
19
The three articles were the work of two authors, Arthur Cain and Jerome Ellison, but the foundation for them and the climate of opinion for their diffusion were the product of a slightly earlier, book length, semi-popular presentation by a distinguished psychiatrist and a sociologist. Dr. Morris E. Chafetz and Harold W. Demone, Jr., in 1962 published
Alcoholism and Society
. The chapter examining “Alcoholics Anonymous” reviewed the Steps and Traditions of the program and fellowship perceptively and in general sympathetically, calling attention especially to the fact that A.A.’s success testified to the defects of other, more classically medical, treatments. In conclusion, Chafetz and Demone reviewed approvingly but not scathingly the usual psychiatric critique of Alcoholics Anonymous. Among the “social and psychological mechanisms” that made A.A. work were that it furnished “a gratifying maternal reunion symbol… [for] the surroundings of the anonymous mass are comforting and secure;” Alcoholics Anonymous required of its members “compulsive, almost vengeful attention to the A.A. way of life [thus utilizing constructively] the mechanism of compulsion;” it “point[ed] the road back to our middle class way of life … perhaps the essence of A.A. derived as it is from our dominant ‘Protestant Ethic”; “most striking” were “the sect-like or cult-like aspects of A.A.”
20
All this had been heard before and even acknowledged, especially by Wilson, as possibly even usefully true. The same might be said of the foundation on which Chafetz based his final and most devastating criticism, for to note that “the conscious turning toward God or emotional giving to others requires a certain sense of being a person” may be understood as simply a slightly different formulation of the sense that had led Wilson to his LSD and vitamin B-3 explorations. But the final critique itself, the one patently picked up by Cain and Ellison, was less acceptable to and surely directly threatening of A.A.’s self-image. “In our opinion, A.A. is really not interested in alcoholics in general, but only as they relate to A.A. itself.”
21
Arthur Cain, in two articles in 1963 (
Harper’s
) and 1965 (
Saturday Evening Post
), offered less restrained criticism. In an opening paragraph that reflected the pomposity he found in Alcoholics Anonymous, the Columbia-trained psychologist flayed “a movement which is becoming one of America’s most fanatical religious cults: ‘A.A.’” Cain expatiated on his “religious” critique by accusing Alcoholics Anonymous of being “anti-science,” “intolerant,” “dogmatic,” and even of having its own “Holy Grail (‘the actual coffee pot Anne used to make the first A.A. coffee’)” and more. “The cake and coffee served after meetings are just refreshments, not the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”
22
+
Any at all sympathetic to Alcoholics Anonymous could readily turn a deaf ear to such an assault as being itself wildly intemperate. Indeed, Bill Wilson — even as he complained that the charges were “garish” — suggested that in them might lurk “half-truths” from which A.A. members could learn. But Cain’s deeper criticism was more telling and harder for A.A. to swallow. His fundamental call was for “sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous without slavery to it.” As he picked up and summarized his theme in his 1965
Post
“Speaking Out” contribution: “A.A. has become a dogmatic cult whose chapters too often turn sobriety into slavery to A.A. Because of its narrow outlook, Alcoholics Anonymous prevents thousands from ever being cured. Moreover A.A. has retarded scientific research into one of America’s most serious health problems.”
23
The key to one aspect of the Cain critique lay hidden in the first verb in the just-quoted passage, “has become.” It was the key also to what Alcoholics Anonymous felt to be the sharper-than-a-serpent’s-tooth attack of Jerome Ellison in 1964, “Alcoholics Anonymous: Dangers of Success.” The
Nation
writer directed his assault at the “Headquarters” of Alcoholics Anonymous, castigating it as “rich in its own right,” run by “self-styled experts” in service to an “ultraconservative board of trustees” and in its “affluence and short-sighted conservatism” offering “tacit endorsement to racial segregation” and preserving “the A.A. ‘Big Book’ [despite its having] an out-of-date, early-century, historical sound.” Ellison reserved his praise for “the rank and file [which] teems with exciting, relevant, informed and up-to-the-minute experience” in much the same way that Cain had harked back to a golden past and urged that “Alcoholics Anonymous should return to its original purpose of being a much-needed first aid station” in his insistence that “sobriety in itself is not a way of life. It is simply the absence of intoxication.”
24
A.A.’s late sixties stress on “responsibility” and change in the trustee ratio at least indirectly spoke to these criticisms. A historian may be more direct, finding more than a little anomaly in a critic of the “religion” of Alcoholics Anonymous basing his assault on an appeal to a largely imaginary Golden Age in the past: also in a scolder of a Headquarters as short-sightedly conservative and so separated from its grass roots, citing as his only two specific examples matters clearly due more to “rank and file” practice than to organizational imposition. For all the truth in the criticisms offered by Cain and Ellison, the continuing history of Alcoholics Anonymous at least to the time of Bill Wilson’s death contradicted their fundamental thrust.